Best tutorials for quickly designing mobile app prototypes

Being able to quickly create mobile application prototypes is very important tool in order to deliver good result – mobile applications loved by users. Prototypes and wire frames let you quickly test the actual application idea, screens and user interactions before spending great amount of time to develop fully working app. Changes will be required for your initial design and there is no escape from this, that’s the nature of great mobile application development process. Remember you are crafting application not for your own use but for other people. In many cases if you go ahead and develop mobile app without collecting initial feedback from potential users you’ll later find that there are missing elements or certain flows within the app are not helping users but rather making it hard for them to enjoy experience. To iron them out will take some time. In worst case you might find that your application does not actually provide any value to its users and all these development hours you have spent are just wasted. By first wireframing and prototyping your mobile application you should be able to solve above problems. We have collected the list of very useful tutorials about this subject and hope you’ll enjoy exploring them. Keep improving your mobile applications!

As part of their iPhone design tutorials Tuts plus team has created an article about wire framing mobile applications. In simple 5 steps this post covers main things you have to go through while prototyping. What is the difference between wire framing and paper prototyping? How to focus on primary task of your mobile application? How to create use case scenarios and many other tips.

Its very extensive and experience packed tutorial by Rachel Hinman from .Net Magazine. Rachael covers 3 main types of prototyping: sketching, paper prototyping and on device – interactive prototyping and goes into each of these with much details and tips and tricks. Some of the questions you will find answered: How to visualize data on small screens? How do you prepare paper prototyping for touch screen devices? What tools are used for interactive on mobile device prototyping and what are pros and cons for using them? Overall very recommended and useful article and tutorial.

This tutorial is how to get from wire frame to actual interactive mobile application prototype. You’ll find sections on how to generate dummy content, how to recruit your colleges, clients and even friends as testers for your mobile application prototype. What are main things to watch while observing users who are using your application? And how do you refine design after prototype testing has finished? Read this tutorial to find out.

Tutorial published on DesignModo goes through the tools and methods available to developers while wireframing and prototyping mobile applications. Written by Marcin Treder who is running startup UXpin related to mobile application desing and wireframing.

This video tutorial is about prototyping applications for Apple iPad tablets. If you prefer watching video and seeing things actually done in front of you its a good tutorial to check out. Its related to specific prototyping software Keynotopia but really shows you how to create a working interactive prototype in less than 30 minutes.

And finally, after you have seen tutorials, examples and different methods for creating mobile application prototypes this list of resources will help you to do first move. This Free mobile device prototyping templates article has a great collection of UI elements for mobile devices. And for many operating systems: iOS, Android, Blackberry and others. We hope we hope all these tutorials, examples and templates will encourage you to think about creating a prototype first and getting feedback from your potential users to improve quality of mobile application. Let us know if we missed something in the comments below.

If you’re looking for something a little bit more flexible, there’s a smarter, faster way to create hi and low fidelity mobile prototyping apps using just a drag and drop tool. Share with your team for fast feedback, and then try it on your own phone – check out the browser based https://www.fluidui.com/editor/live/
Also, see the new easy to follow ‘how to get started’ video clips on our YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uodln1GmrFM Hope this helps! 🙂
Cheers,Ronan